Bryn Mawr College Library Special Collections holds over
600 books printed before 1850 that are related to travel. These books cover
a striking variety of topics and are grouped according to the geographical
area they pertain to in the following census.

Travel
writing necessarily entails the blending of different genres, as the description
of a voyage can include observations on everything from history and religion
to botany and zoology. The travel literature pre-dating 1850 in our collection
spans all fields of interest, with even individual accounts rarely heeding
modern disciplinary boundaries. Most traveler's accounts are written in the
first-person, so autobiography is also brought into the mix in many cases.
The writings included in the following list are considered 'factual' (in contrast
with works of evident fiction), but in travel writing there often arises a
tension between truth and fiction, between scientific observation, and a self-consciously
literary mode designed to entertain the reader. Travel writing can range from
statistical gazetteers purged of anecdote, to highly personal accounts of
religious pilgrimage, and tales of survival under dangerous circumstances.
During the period of European exploration of Asia and the Americas that began
in the fifteenth-century many travelers attempted to achieve a balance of
scientific and literary interest in their written accounts. As this phenomenon
coincided with the invention and growth of printing, travelers' accounts came
to be among the most widely read books available. By the late eighteenth-century
they were second in popularity only to romances. As a consequence, a trend
arose of compiling the most popular stories of exploration and discovery and
publishing them as collections of travel literature. London publisher J. Knox's
1767 series A New Collection of Voyages, Discoveries and Travels is
one such example.

Many of the earliest published travel accounts relate the experiences
of European religious pilgrims to the Holy Land. Bernhard
von Breydenbach's fifteenth-century Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam
is the earliest printed description of a journey to Jerusalem. Tales of pilgrimage
allowed non-traveling Christians to imaginatively experience the voyage to
a sacred place. Although the number of pilgrimages began to decline in the
Renaissance, Europeans continued traveling for other reasons.
Commercial and colonial interests began to take precedence. Arnoldus Montanus's
seventeenth century accounts of China and Japan were based on information
provided by agents of the East-India Company, and were lavishly illustrated.
Theodor de Bry chronicled the earliest attempts to colonize the Americas in
similarly grand style by incorporating elaborate engravings into his books.
Leo Africanus was commissioned by the Pope to survey and describe the largely
unexplored continent of Africa for the benefit of his European patrons. Europeans
had access to the observations of missionaries abroad through such compilations
as Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses: Ecrites des Missions Etrangeres,
in which Jesuit letters were published. As Nigel Leask has noted, Europeans
often couched their desire to travel and explore in terms of 'curiosity',
but seemingly benign curiosity was often as much about
the impulse to possess or to profit as it was about expanding human knowledge.
Exploratory and scientific expeditions to distant continents were frequently
combined
with other interests: commercial, missionary, or military. European travel
accounts of this era share a marked ethnocentricity, as the authors invariably
take the European world as a starting point of normalcy and observe a world
increasingly strange, exotic and monstrous the further they venture from home.
Travelers such as Jean de Lery, author of Histoire d'un Voyage Faict en
la Terre du Bresil in 1580, delight in describing all that would be shocking
to European sensibilities in these newly discovered lands. The marvels encountered
by Europeans elicited responses ranging from awe and admiration to fear and
mistrust.

It
has always been the case that the best known explorers were those who wrote
accounts of their travels, or whose journeys were written about by others.
For instance, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Mungo
Park all documented their explorations. Among the most famous sea expeditions
were those undertaken by Captain James Cook, which were written about by John
Hawkesworth and by Cook himself. Once circumnavigation had been accomplished
by explorers such as Cook and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, and the task
of mapping the world's coastlines was well underway, the lure of intercontinental
exploration took over. An era of scientific travel followed, out of which
Charles Darwin's surveying voyages are perhaps most famous. Voyages into the
interior of uncharted continents could bring travelers into graver danger
than had hitherto been imagined as they came up against tropical diseases,
harsh climates, foreign plants, strange animals, and people with whom they
had no established relationship. The description of marine travel usually
necessitated a great deal of technical language, but interior exploration
was better suited to the reading public's appetite for entertaining tales
of adventure. Meriwether Lewis' account of his explorations with Captain Clarke
across the American continent, and Charles-Maire de La Condamine's Relation
Abrege d'un Voyage Fait dans l'Interieur de l'Amerique Meridionale, both
belong to this class of travel writing. "Survival literature" became
tremendously popular in the late eighteenth-century. In some cases, the writing
and publishing of harrowing tales was a strategy for the survivors of calamitous
voyages to finance fresh starts. Stories of Europeans surviving foreign captivity,
such as sailor Robert Adams' tale of shipwreck and enslavement on the western
coast of Africa, eerily invert the far broader reality of foreign enslavement
at the hands of westerners. As Mary Campbell points out, travelers' accounts
are often "guilty texts" which document European colonialism and
Christian imperialism. They are indeed texts with political and historical
consequences, but they are also works of literary interest.

Throughout
the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries leisure travel became more and more
convenient for wealthy Europeans. Accounts of domestic travel were a valuable
resource for those preparing to embark on the Grand Tour, an increasingly
popular rite of passage. Ritchie Leitch's Travelling Sketches on the Rhine,
and in Belgium and Holland is a characteristic account of such an undertaking.
By the early nineteenth-century, privileged Americans were steadily following
suit, producing memoirs like J. Jay Smith's A Summer's Jaunt Across the
Water. America was also becoming a tourist destination for Europeans as
Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley's Travels in the United States, etc., during
1849 and 1850 demonstrates. The rise in the publication of recreational
travel literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries reflects
these trends. An increasingly literate public proved an eager audience
for the wide variety of travel accounts that were entering into publication,
from guidebooks to traveler' journals, and from works focused on natural history
and geography to those detailing cases of religious and political imperialism.

The
census of our collection of travel books printed before 1850 includes texts
that will be of interest to scholars of nearly every discipline. Travel accounts
may include detailed descriptions of local crafts, costume, and religious
practices. Exploratory parties often included experts on a variety of topics
ranging from linguistics to local medicine to geology. Special attention in
often given to art, architecture, and antiquities in early guidebooks for
leisure travelers, like John Stow's A Survey of the Cities of London and
Westminster, which were designed specifically for tourists rather than
written as accounts of personal travel. Many of these texts also provide valuable
insights into European political and social history. For a modern reader,
European accounts of non-European lands and peoples interestingly tend to
reveal more about the authors' preconceived notions about whatever they are
describing than about their ostensible subjects.

Our collection has been built in large part through the generous
gift of many long-time friends and benefactors of the library, especially
former president Catherine McBride and Seymour Adelman.